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Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victim may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. -- C S Lewis

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Below are some interesting accounts on Twitter, provided here for entertainment or informational purposes only. We do not own these accounts nor do we necessarily endorse any of the content appearing hereafter. We certainly do not endorse the Root of All Evil's tweets.

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Sunday, 15 July 2012

Super Twat of the Month - July 2012 (Part 1)

Introduction

Each month this blog will choose one person or an organisation to be our
Super Twat of the Month. Our STOTM will normally be a public figure
who is an anti-smoker activist and/or someone who is trashing (or
attempting to trash) our civil liberties in support of a Nanny or
Surveillance State. If this blog had to have only one motto, it would
be "Educate, Don't Legislate." STOTMs want to legislate your lifestyles
away. The people we choose to be STOTMs often claim to be in support of
civil liberties, but in reality they only want liberties to be applied
to the causes or groups of people they identify with. Here we call them
out for their hypocrisy. We are not so naive that we believe this blog
will have any impact on their decisions, but we can hope.

(Due to length, we have decided to publish this month's STOTM article in two parts.)

Super Twat of the Month - July 2012

July's Super Twat is Dr Anna B. Gilmore, MBBS, DTM&H, MSc, MFPHM - Professor of Public Health & Director of the Tobacco Control Research Group at the University of Bath.

Dr Anna Gilmore

To be honest, we never wanted to write anything about Dr Gilmore. We believed others were doing a brilliant job at exposing any flaws in her research and publications, and countering her statements for and on behalf of the tobacco control industry, so we saw little point in covering it ourselves. But there is another reason we didn't want to write about Gilmore that is much more selfish: self-preservation. Simply seeing her name in print is usually enough to start us on a month-long binge drinking affair reminiscent of Nicolas Cage's character in "Leaving Las Vegas." For the sake of our livers, sanity and happiness, we've avoided Gilmore these last few months.

But when Gilmore launched her Tobacco Tactics wiki designed not only to attack Big Tobacco but also to intimidate and silence bloggers, libertarians or anyone who disagrees with the parasitical tobacco control industry, we could no longer avoid her. So risking our very lives, we begin:

The Good

Dr Gilmore's early research into meningococcal disease is impressive and cited often.

Gilmore also worked in a refugee camp in Nepal and a community hospital in India

At the beginning of Gilmore's career she did extensive research and published several papers about meningococcal disease, which causes life-threatening meningitis and sepsis (blood poisoning) conditions. This is a disease that truly kills hundreds of thousands of people each year, mainly children and the elderly, particularly in developing countries. If one were genuinely interested in "protecting the children," any research into this field is worthwhile. Gilmore's research papers about the disease have been cited numerously in subsequent publications and studies. The work she did in this field of medicine should be considered laudable, especially if it helped to save any lives.

A press release from the University of Bath indicates that Dr Gilmore also had "stints" in a Nepali refugee camp and a community hospital in India. We don't know what sort of work she did; we can find nothing on-line about her work at these places. Nevertheless, we assume that helping refugees in any kind of medical capacity is definitely a good thing. We suppose that we'll have to wait until she publishes her auto-biography to learn about what she did at the beginning of her career.

The Bad

The vast majority of Dr Gilmore's work since 2001 has been in tobacco control

Her research to shore up public support for tobacco control is often criticised as "junk science"

Gilmore is now actively merging tobacco control with alcohol control polices

European editor of Tobacco Control magazine

Council Member of Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) England (former Board Member)

Member of Smokefree South West's steering committee (the organisation runs the Plain Packs campaign)

Created the Tobacco Tactics wiki, which was part-funded by Smokefree South West

Has helped to shape numerous legislative policies against smokers that have hurt communities

Her claims of being denigrated and harassed look like propaganda

Research Ain't Cheap

While working on staff at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, sometime around 2001 Dr Gilmore apparently abandoned her research about meningococcal disease and switched to tobacco control. It is unclear whether this was a personal choice or perhaps influenced by her colleague Dr Martin McKee (who co-authored many tobacco control industry research papers with Gilmore).

"I qualified as a doctor but I realised that if I really wanted
to make an impact on public health I needed to get behind
the root causes, rather than just treating the symptoms.
Tobacco kills more people than anything else, so that was the
area I wanted to have an impact.It’s an exciting time to be involved in tobacco research
– it’s high on the agenda of governments around the world,
which means there is more money for research than ever
before."

Make of that quote what you will, but our opinion is that it provides true insights into the world of career academics and researchers. We can only suppose that perhaps meningococcal disease studies and treating sick people are not nearly as glamorous, politically-influential or academically grant-worthy as it may be working in tobacco control.

For all career academics, the need to secure funding for your research is paramount. Influences and pressure from commercial or government sources of funding could bring a lack of objectivity in the research. In this Guardian article, Charles Ferguson writes:

Over the past couple of decades medical professionals have amply
demonstrated the influence money can have in a supposedly objective,
scientific field.

British universities have become spineless lackeys of central
government, lickspittles at the trough of subsidy. They plead they are a
"golden investment" in the nation's future, yet they cry "higher
purpose" when this claim is challenged. Those who went to university,
including captains of industry, go along with this confidence trick to
justify the advantage they gained from the experience, and hope their
children can benefit too.

The bottom line is that research is not cheap and universities and researchers need lots of funding to survive. Securing funding from private or government institutions can be difficult even in the best of times. With a near-broken peer-review system, it is not hard to imagine that in some circumstances objectivity and integrity can go right out of the window when it comes to research paid for by industry that seeks a particular result.

Indeed, the tobacco control industry tirelessly claim that any research paid for or on behalf of tobacco companies must be viewed as suspect research, biased in favour of the industry, and therefore automatically discredited and invalid. The hypocrisy of these statements seems lost on tobacco control researchers, whose funding is often secured through pressure charities like ASH or other dedicated organisations (private charities or governmental) with a clear tobacco-control agenda. By hiding behind a university's academic credentials, by using private charities, and by waving their banners of "public health" and "protect the children," the tobacco control industry makes dubious claims that its research is unbiased and therefore the only research that matters in the debate. We truly doubt it.

Regardless of the rhetoric about who funds the research, the take-home lesson is that researchers need constant funding for current and future projects. So we wonder: How better to ensure said funding than to sit on committees that are likely to fund your research? As we will see in part 2 of this post, Anna Gilmore has seemingly positioned herself to do exactly that.

Queen of Junk Science?

We see little need to challenge the quality or accuracy of Dr Gilmore's tobacco control research here since others have done so repeatedly and far better than we can. Suffice it to say that it does seem as though Gilmore and former research partner Linda Bauld are a bit thin-skinned and clearly resent having their work labelled as a "junk science" as evidenced by the number of articles on the Tobacco Tactics wiki complaining about it. (ed note: we found the Tobacco Tactics wiki quite helpful in listing articles that debunked Gilmore's work -- we doubt that was her intention.)

Gilmore apparently believes she has been denigrated by libertarians and bloggers, but name-calling aside, is it really denigration of one's work when someone actually proves the claims you have made were distorted in pursuit of a particular agenda? Ironically, by complaining about denigration rather than standing by her work and/or backing up her work with further evidence, Gilmore has succeeded in lending further credence to her detractors' claims of junk science as well as helping them attain a wider audience than they already had. In our view, it is an own goal.

Furthermore, if the following claims of denigration had not been made in the press (see Daily Mail article here), it is unlikely we would have ever chosen Anna Gilmore as Super Twat of the Month. Gilmore said:

We've had abuse before, over the debate about banning smoking in public places, and I get some of this every time I publish a paper, but it's increasing...This is part of a deliberate attempt to misinform the public and politicians, denigrate our research and to harass, denigrate and undermine us as researchers."

She gets abuse every time she publishes a paper? Really? And it's increasing? If true, is it perhaps because people are angry and feel that Gilmore is deliberately misleading the public to support tobacco control legislation? We don't know, and it would not be an excuse for harassment if it is the case. Regardless, for some reason Gilmore seems to believe that no one is allowed to disagree with her studies. Indeed, the entire tobacco control industry acts this way. If proving Gilmore wrong time and time again is denigration, then perhaps we need to add a new definition to that word.

I'm Not a Nazi! I'm Not a Nazi!

That latest whinge about denigration does not seem to be the first time Anna Gilmore has taken umbrage to people challenging her work or calling her names. Perhaps weary of being compared to or called a anti-smoking Nazi, she and two other researchers (Martin McKee and Eleonore Bachinger) published a study in a clear attempt to disassociate the modern tobacco control movement with the anti-smoking movement in Nazi Germany, arguing that things were "complex." It was a weak attempt at re-framing the Nazi debate in respect of current German reluctance to implement strict smoking ban polices for fear of having it associated with Hitler's anti-smoking policies. It had the opposite effect, however.

Again, by bringing even more attention to being compared to Nazis, they have only succeeded in more closely associating themselves with it. Even more concerning, it appears to us as if they learnt some tactics from their research of Nazi Germany policies and tactics. Here, for example, is a short [fair use] excerpt from their study (Public Health Volume 122, Issue 5 , Pages 497-505, May 2008):

"Insights can be gained"? What kind of insights? Perhaps this insight: "As tobacco is the most dangerous toxin for the circulatory system, it is
avoided by all athletes’, and would be altogether ‘unmanly’" Now compare that particular insight to this Gilmore quote in a Brighton Wired article a few years later about Wayne Rooney and other athletes smoking:

Anna Gilmore, professor of public health at the University of Bath,
agreed that athletes have a responsibility to their fan base to be
'responsible role modes'. (sic)

[...]

But she said athletes should also be thinking of the effect that the nicotine is having on their own health and performance.

"Smoking has a very detrimental effect on health and would affect one's ability to function as an athlete," she said.

"It has significant impacts on the cardiovascular and respiratory systems, which are essential to athletic performance."

So, in our opinion, there are some obvious parallels with the Nazi anti-smoking movement and today's anti-smoker movement. The tactics to denormalise smokers and further an anti-smoking agenda between the two eras are clearly similar in many respects. It's impossible not to draw comparisons. But is it really any of Gilmore's business that Wayne Rooney or any other athlete was having a fag? Is it anyone's business but the athletes'? No, it isn't. Naturally, like any totalitarian movement designed to control behaviour, those in tobacco control like Anna Gilmore with the help of the media have made it their business.

Forget the Children, I'm the Victim!

Despite the claims of denigration against Gilmore personally and professionally, it was playing the victim card in the press that we believe deserves closer scrutiny. Was security really stepped up at Bath? If telephonic threats were made as often as they claim (seven phone calls per day for months), were these reported to the police? Why haven't any arrests been made?

We're not saying that Gilmore and her team wasn't harassed, and we certainly do not condone threats or harassment of any kind, but we have to wonder if perhaps there was some embellishment about what actually happened and what, if any, the real threat may have been.

Certainly the press used blog quotes out of context in an attempt to legitimise the tobacco control industry's story. In addition, Linda Bauld, Deborah Arnott and Stephen Williams also claimed they were harassed, or threatened or abused in some fashion. If any of this is true, surely the police would have acted on it and arrested someone?

Stephen Williams's tweet

(A few weeks prior to that tweet by Williams, he attended a public debate over plain packs. He was not threatened or harmed by anyone, nor did he receive any homophobic abuse at the debate. By all accounts, the debate was civil. If there really is an angry mob of bloggers and libertarians out to harass tobacco control advocates, they apparently missed their chance to do so at this debate. We also could find no evidence of homophobic abuse on his blog, although if there was any we suppose it must have been deleted.)

In our opinion, the timing of the story in the press is highly suspect. It came out only a day after the WHO announced its campaign to expose pro-tobacco advocates. If there were actual threats (and not just angry rants) made to Gilmore's team six months earlier and which carried on for several months as she claims, then we would have expected a story to come out sooner than 1st June 2012. But there were no stories. Why hold it back? And no one was arrested. Why not? We wonder if the police, assuming they were contacted, decided these alleged threats were not credible. Regardless, we are expected to take Gilmore at her word that she was in fear for her life. The media certainly did.

Of course no mention was made in those articles about how Gilmore's tobacco control advocacy has genuinely harmed smokers or put publicans out of business. The tobacco control industry consistently denies that their policies have harmed anyone including businesses, but this does not appear to be the case at all. This Daily Mail article explains how tobacco control policies have turned smokers into filthy lepers:

Anti-smoking campaigns and laws have turned smokers into a despised underclass, a study by a Department of Health adviser warned [...]

The history of public health is scarred by policies which, pursued in the name of health protection and promotion, have served to intensify public vilification and state-sanctioned discrimination against already disadvantaged groups

But what should we make of Gilmore's own study which indicates that Somali women in London are at genuine risk of being harmed? Pat Nurse wrote about it here and said:

While she trumpeted what a great success the ban had been and misled the public about how it had reduced heart attacks
which has since been exaggerated by the press, she kept strangely quiet
about the fact that it humiliated and socially isolated older people -
women especially - and created dangerous situations for Somali women who
now have to take to the streets in hoodies to hide from male violence
in a culture where women are second class citizens.

We cannot help but feel that Gilmore's claims of being threatened have been exaggerated and embellished in pursuit of their agenda for plain packs, but of course we cannot know what actually happened. Furthermore, we can find no evidence that any tobacco control advocate has ever been physically harmed by pro-tobacco advocates nor by any bloggers who despise the tobacco control industry. Are we really supposed to believe their stories just because they said it happened?

Gilmore's and the others' claims in the press certainly appear to us as a deceitful propaganda stunt designed to tar anyone who disagrees with tobacco control as deranged lunatics in line with the latest WHO propaganda. It also served to advertise the launch of Gilmore's Tobacco Tactics wiki. Coincidence? We do not believe so, but that is just our speculative opinion.